I don't think this is about politicians duping coal workers, no. And that $1M bonus idea is just a comparison of scale. It's a comparatively tiny industry, wh

I don't think this is about politicians duping coal workers, no. And that $1M bonus idea is just a comparison of scale. It's a comparatively tiny industry, which is extremely harmful to the environment and its workers. There are certainly coal-mining towns that exist solely because of what's in the ground, and of course you can't just dig up something else there. I'm not a "rootless cosmopolitan tech worker," I'm one of the only cousins in my family who isn't blue-collar or in deep poverty. I don't expect this to be painless, but we need to get off of coal for the good of the species. I don't think the coal workers are being duped. I know that they're in a really tough spot. I think that the coal (and more generally fossil-fuel) executives are lobbying politicians hard, with complete disregard for the long-term impact that we've known very clearly for _decades_ now. Follow the money: politicians and executives are raking it in, and the small population of front-line workers' lives depend on it. Blame the politicians, blame the executives, who make their decisions for personal benefit at great cost to humanity. Quitting tobacco, as a person, is hard in part because of withdrawal symptoms. The analog for quitting coal, as a nation, is that an industry needs to die. We need good policies to take care of the people whose jobs are impacted, but we techies are in large part responsible for automating away entire industries -- way more than 40k jobs -- and who's there to take care of _those_ workers?